Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to storage systems and, more specifically, to restoration of snapshots of volumes in a storage system.
Background Information
A storage system typically includes one or more storage devices, such as solid state drives (SSDs), into which information may be entered, and from which information may be obtained, as desired. The storage system may logically organize the information stored on the devices as storage containers, such as volumes or logical units (LUNs). Each storage container may be implemented as a set of data structures, such as data blocks that store data for the storage containers and metadata blocks that describe the data of the storage containers. For example, the metadata may describe, e.g., identify, storage locations on the devices for the data.
Management of the storage containers may include creation of snapshots (read-only) and/or clones (read-write) of the storage containers taken at points in time and accessed by one or more clients or hosts of the storage system. Often a user, such as an administrator, may use one or more snapshots to create backup storage containers (“backups”) of data that may embody a single LUN or a group of LUNs. The administrator may utilize the backups to undo any changes to the LUN(s) that have occurred since creation of the snapshots by restoring the states of data in the LUN(s) to the points in time of the snapshots. It is desirable to undo the changes and restore the states of data in the LUN(s) so as to minimize disruption to the host, e.g., without removing the LUN(s) from the host or changing their identities in a way that causes an outage or crash of the host.